Bill Gates… But First, John D. Rockefeller

You may have wondered why Kennedy’s book title includes Bill Gates. Gates doesn’t enter the picture until almost page 300. I’m going to try to paint the picture of the problem with Gates but first, I want to talk about John D. Rockefeller because, as you’ll see, Rockefeller’s pattern of ruining healthcare in America created a pattern that Gates has followed, almost to the letter. He couldn’t have duplicated it better if he had carefully studied Rockefeller’s actions and then planned his own. 

Most people are slightly familiar with Rockefeller as an early industrialist with vast wealth. At one point, both Gates and Rockefeller had terrible image problems. Both were seen as robber barons who set up monopolies that benefitted them and made others suffer. 

In fact, in 1911, the Supreme Court rules that Rockefeller’s Standard Oil constituted an “unreasonable monopoly.” Senator Robert Lafayette described Rockefeller as “the greatest criminal of the age.”

The company was ordered broken up into 34 companies. From that, we got Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Marathon and other oil companies. Paradoxically, Rockefeller got much richer after this breakup. 

To burnish his reputation, JD turned to what he considered philanthropy. Rockefeller’s chief advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates, advised Rockefeller:

…judicious disposal of his fortune might also blunt further inquiry into its origins. 

Rockefeller’s father was a snake oil salesman, selling opium elixirs and miracle cures. Perhaps that’s why Rockefeller’s focus for his philanthropy was initially medicine. He sent an educator named Abraham Flexner on a tour of the country’s medical schools and hospitals to come up with a plan of action. 

The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1910 Flexner Report recommended centralizing America’s medical schooling, abolishing miasma theory [see below] and reorienting these institutions according to “germ theory”—which held that germs alone caused disease—and the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition. [Page 285]

A miasma is a highly unpleasant or unhealthy smell or vapor. The following quote is from an essay, The History of Public Health: 

Miasmists believed that disease was caused by infectious mists or noxious vapors emanating from filth in the towns and that the method of prevention of infectious diseases was to establish sanitary measures to clean the streets of garbage, sewage, animal carcasses, and wastes that were features of urban living. This provided the basis for the Sanitary Movement, with great benefit to improving health conditions. [Page 285]

Back to Kennedy’s observations on the Rockefeller Foundation: 

…Rockefeller financed the campaign to consolidate mainstream medicine, co-opt the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry, and shutter its competition. Rockefeller’s crusade caused the closure of more than half of American medical schools, fostered public and press scorn for homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, nutritional, holistic, functional, integrative, and natural medicines, and led to the incarceration of many practicing physicians. 

A doctor educated in and dedicated to germ theory believes that the right thing to do is identify the dangerous microbe and tailor a poison to kill it. If that poison weakens the immune system and reduces the person’s health, that’s too bad. 

In many contexts, Kennedy observes, the germ theory results in medical personnel attacking a completely wrong target. 

Miasmists argue that malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water are the ultimate stressors that make infectious diseases lethal in impoverished locales. When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death of malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. [Page 286]

You can see, as Kennedy can, that this viewpoint results in a militaristic approach to medicine instead of a social approach. Instead of cleaning the wells and improving nutrition in countries with starving populations, you line people up and give them vaccines. Understanding this will become very important when we talk about Bill Gates. 

Coal Tar

Some people already know that many synthetic vitamins are derived from coal tar. So are many artificial flavorings. These substances don’t act in the body like foods, they act like toxins. Inventing “therapeutic” substances derived from petrochemical sources to be used in medicine was one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s early projects. 

In accordance with the pharmaceutical paradigm, [Rockefeller]… provided large grants to scientists for identifying the active chemicals in disease-curing plants utilized by the traditional doctors he had extirpated [completely eradicated and destroyed]. Rockefeller chemists then synthesized and patented petrochemical versions of those molecules. [Page 289]

Next, Rockefeller turned his attentions to the eradication of yellow fever.

The Rockefeller Foundation launched a “public-private partnership” with pharmaceutical companies called the International Health Commission, which set about feverishly inoculating the hapless populations of the colonized tropics with a yellow fever jab. The vaccine killed its beneficiaries in droves and failed to prevent yellow fever. The Rockefeller Foundation quietly dropped the useless vaccine… [Page 290]

Gradually, the foundation gained power and influence. By the 1920s, this power went international. 

The Rockefeller Foundation provided almost half the budget for the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) following its founding in 1922 and populated LNHO ranks with its veterans and favorites. The RF imbued the League with its philosophy, structure, values, precepts, and ideologists, all of which its successor body, the WHO, inherited at its inauguration in 1948. 

One critic noted:

But the RF rarely addressed the most important causes of death, notably infantile diarrhea and tuberculosis… which demanded long-term, socially oriented investments, such as improved housing, clean water, and sanitation systems. [Page 290]

Philanthrocapitalism

How then has Bill Gates followed this pattern? Most of that story will arrive in the next installment. But I’ll give you this from Kennedy’s introduction to the subject. 

Gates has dubbed [The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] operational philosophy “philanthrocapitalism”… Bill and Melinda Gates donated $36 billion of Microsoft stock to the BMGF between 1994 and 2020… Gates strategically targets BMGF’s charitable gifts to give him control of the international health and agricultural agencies and the media, allowing him to dictate global health and food policies so as to increase profitability of the large multinationals in which he and his foundation hold large investment positions. Following such tactics, the Gates Foundation has given away some $54.8 billion since 1994, but instead of depleting his wealth, those strategic gifts have magnified it… Gates’s personal net worth grew from $63 billion in 2000 to $133.6 billion today. Gates’s wealth expanded by $23 billion just during the 2020 lockdowns that he and Dr. Fauci played key roles in orchestrating. 

…Since shortly after its founding, his foundation has owned stakes in multiple drug companies. A recent investigation by The Nation revealed that the Gates Foundation currently holds corporate stocks and bonds in drug companies like Merck, GSK [GlaxoSmithKlein], Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, and Sanofi. Gates also has heavy positions in Gilead, Biogen, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Novavax, and Inovio. [Page 291] 

Most of these companies have been front and center in our news headlines since the beginning of COVID. And Gates has been profiting from the success of every one. 

A Personal Note: Rockefeller and his foundation have long been on my personal radar. In my work studying and writing about addiction recovery, I found that the origin of the movement to prescribe addictive medications to those struggling with addiction to heroin or other opioids started with the RF. In New York in the 1960s, when there was a terrible problem with heroin, the RF proposed methadone as a solution. Methadone and its successor buprenorphine are still the most highly-touted and officially-supported solutions to addiction. However, both methadone and buprenorphine are opioids. They are also addictive. And both are drugs of abuse, traded on the black market. Therefore, a person who wants to recover from their opioid addiction is subjected to the same kind of drug, day in and day out, for years, sometimes decades. Many professionals in addiction treatment recommend keeping a person on one of these medications “indefinitely.”